The resolution of the debate will come from future data and future analysis.

The scientific community is actively working to obtain the relevant ancient genomes and to develop the methods needed to test the competing models.

The answer will come, and when it does, it will almost certainly be more nuanced than any of the current models.

What will not change is the fundamental reality: the ancient people of Lagoa Santa were the ancestors of people who are alive today, who live in Brazil, who carry the specific cultural and linguistic traditions that have been maintained across the millennia since the caves of the cerrado were first inhabited.

The signal in their DNA is one small piece of a much larger story — a story that belongs to those communities as much as it belongs to science, and that science has an obligation to tell carefully, accurately, and with appropriate humility about the limits of what the evidence can establish.